The border regions of West Africa were badly hit by the recent Ebola epidemic and remain particularly vulnerable. As part of ongoing response efforts, the American Red Cross and its partners are conducting rapid field mapping of all communities within 15 kilometres of the international borders shared between Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone – focusing on water, sanitation, health, and public amenities in each community. The fieldwork is being carried out by volunteers on motorbikes, equipped with a smartphone app (OpenMapKit) and other technical tools. To facilitate and help plan these field efforts, we are asking for assistance tracing roads, communities, and buildings.

American Red Cross data collection is already underway in these areas. With your contribution to this task, you will assist with providing more current and relevant data to field team leaders and volunteers currently in the field.

When saving your work, please leave the default comment but add what you actually mapped, for example "added buildings and a residential road".

Roads

The emphasis for this task is to fill out the road network to connect communities, so that we can help our volunteers figure out how to get from Point A to Point B. We are less concerned about minor tracks and paths. Please continue tracing the connecting roads in the task area even if they fall outside of the AOI polygon.

highway=tertiary for roads between communities that are about two car-widths wide

highway=residential inside residential boundaries that can still fit a car

Residential landuse areas

Please draw a boundary around clusters of buildings to help us identify community locations and sizes